Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar Team Up to Record Jack Kerouac Album

Watch the video for their song "San Francisco"

The last time Ben Gibbard split off from the rest of Death Cab for Cutie to record an album's worth of songs, that album was the Postal Service's Give Up, and half a million sensitive indie types swooned. (Of note: That Postal Service album still absolutely rules, eff a backlash.)

Farrar and Gibbard originally got together in 2007 to record music for the forthcoming Jack Kerouac documentary One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. (Both Gibbard and Farrar appear in the film, as do Tom Waits, Patti Smith, and many of Kerouac's contemporaries.) That collaboration blossomed into an entire full-length album, which has the same title as the movie. Gibbard and Farrar wrote and performed all the songs together, with lyrics taken from Kerouac's 1962 novel Big Sur. You can watch the music video for the Farrar-sung track "San Francisco" here, and the tracklist is below. The trailer for the film can be seen here.

One Fast Move or I'm Gone is due October 20 on F-Stop/Atlantic, the day before the 40th anniversary of Kerouac's death. The documentary will also be out on October 20, and you can either buy the Gibbard/Farrar album by itself on CD or vinyl or packaged with the DVD. There will also be a deluxe CD/DVD package that includes a copy of Kerouac's novel and a 40-page book on the documentary.

Farrar and Gibbard are both big fans of Kerouac. When he was working on Death Cab's Narrow Stairs, Gibbard even stayed in the same Big Sur cabin that Kerouac used to write his book.

In to an interviewFarrar did with the St. Louis Riverfront Times (via TwentyFourBit), he had to say about the project: "We both wound up in the studio together, just sort of decided to take a step further and record a whole batch of songs. It's kind of evolved into a real project... It was a great experience working with Ben. I guess because there wasn't a whole lot of planning that went into the process, I think we both really got a lot from the experience."